IntuitiveDesigns

When we started this blog last year, we decided to have a rants and raves section where we would place one rant and one rave in the same post. Kind of like yin and yang, to balance each other out. So, here is our first rant/rave.

Rave: Ma.nolia.com
Why?: Their excellent service and nice website.
Details: I had been playing for a few years with del.icio.us for awhile, but I just never got into it. The idea of social bookmarking is pretty cool, but the design of the site totally turned me off. It’s just so bland, that as a designer it kills me to look at it. I know it’s simple and functional, but something with a little kick would be nice.

Then Ma.gnolia came along. When I first saw the beauty of a site that it is, I thought wow! It’s well laid out and just as functional as del.icio.us, but has enough extra features to make it stand apart including screenshots of the bookmarks, bookmark ratings, and what I think is a better community system. And did I mention that the design is nice?

But, that’s not what stole my heart. What really moved me to use their site was the excellent help they gave me. I had almost 2000 bookmarks that I wanted to import from my Firefox browser to their site. They have an easy to use tool to import, but the bookmarks were not going through. I got in touch with the product manager, Todd, who was extremely helpful.

After we tried importing a few times without success, I didn’t hear from them for a few days. So, I figured that they gave up on me. You know how that works on the internet, people just ignore you until you go away. I was really surprised later when Todd got back in touch with me and thanked me for my patience. I finally managed to get my bookmarks imported and they even offered to do it for me if I couldn’t. On top of that, they were extremely kind and professional. I am definitely a fan now.

Rant: Yahoo Groups
Why?: They killed my group.
Details: I belong to a very active yahoo group of web designers that is more than 7 years old. About 2 1/2 weeks ago yahoo decided to improve their email messages by adding extra features. About two days after that, the email from the group just stopped. The messages could be posted on their site, but the emails were not going through and many of us were getting bounces. The group owner tried to get help from Yahoo and so did a few other people in the group including myself.

In the first place, finding help was almost next to impossible. Yahoo doesn’t have any support links to talk to a real person unless you search their help database first. This was totally frustrating because I knew that help for this particular problem wouldn’t be in the database and I spent about half an hour trying to find a way to contact them.

When I did find a contact, they asked for my group name, email address, and comments. Since I have 3 email addresses that I use for the Yahoo Groups, I gave them my hotmail address. They replied two days later saying that it was hotmail’s fault and that I should contact msn for support. Huh?

So, I wrote again saying that I was having a problem with all of my email addresses and none of the members of my group were getting their emails either. They wrote back again asking for all of my email addresses that I use on the groups and a list of all of the message numbers that I didn’t receive. So, I sent them both things. Now I haven’t heard anything back. That was over a week ago and still nothing. They even sent me a request for feedback on their support a few days ago. What support?

Now the owner of the group is moving the whole mailing list to her own server because Yahoo won’t help any of us. I think that they shouldn’t offer a service they don’t want to support, free or not.